ABSTRACT
According to the Martinican writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant, the maroon as a symbolic figure is the only legitimate hero of anti-colonial resistance in Caribbean history: whereas the colonizers’ historical and juridical discourses ceaselessly denounced him as a lawless bandit, his legacy as an ideal of opposition against the colonial superior persists. Although European colonialism in the Americas and slavery as practiced during the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans are recognized as highly complex phenomena, socio-cultural and literary discourses from the 19th to the 21st century are largely marked by pithy binary oppositions such as freedom versus oppression and servility versus resistance. In contrast to the rather clear repetition of the antagonism between heroic resistance and servile assimilation which marks Glissant’s, Patrick Chamoiseau’s, and Raphael Confiant’s theoretical discourses on marronage and the maroon, the image of the maroon that these authors establish in their respective literary texts, Mahagony, and Negre marron is far more complex and diverse.
